Exclusive: Bonpoint Grows Up

Christine Innamorato, Bonpoint’s creative director, has been fielding requests for grown-up looks for years now.

And for years now, she has been filing away ideas from friends, fans, shoppers, and everyone else until the time was right.

Turns out, she pulled a fast one. Already this season, she managed to slip a few women’s pieces in alongside junior sizes from the brand’s YAM collection toward the back of the beautiful, sprawling Bonpoint flagship on the Left Bank. Her clients swiftly took note.

Now, Innamorato is ready for the reveal. “The Bonpoint woman is a free spirit,” she told Vogue in a recent interview. “She’s not ostentatious, and her idea of luxury isn’t aggressive; it’s very feminine and fresh.”

A few years back, Innamorato had her own womenswear label, so she knows her subject from every possible angle. Instinctively, she knew that no matter how much women may delight in dressing their children in Bonpoint, the equation wasn’t as pat as simply scaling up or getting cute with a copycat proposition for moms. “I think what people fall in love with is a color, a material, a texture, so it’s really a question of transposing that.”

Her runway presentations during Couture probably helped move things along. For one thing, every editor in Paris showed up. (A few have even opined, sotto voce, that it was the best show of the week.) For another, if many high-fashion houses are moving into childrenswear, why shouldn’t a brand like Bonpoint, with its built-in base of loyalists, grow up, too? Now, her womenswear will leapfrog the YAM brand, gradually taking over its boutiques.

It will come as no surprise that there’s a family resemblance in the Spring collection, from colors and materials to accessories like techy little sandals, sneakers, and visors, as well as a series of bags and totes developed in collaboration with L/Uniform.

Not surprisingly, Innamorato took her cue from Parisian chic and nonchalance, spinning it out as a little blue polo with red-and-white stripes, a nude crepe de Chine blouse with apple green shorts, a “fish-scale blue” pleated skirt, a mint green shorts suit, and lush batik vegetation on a black ground or an easy black sundress. A midnight blue car coat in lightweight leather bonded with neoprene, and a blue neoprene baseball jacket and a smoky transparent raincoat had all the makings of instant staples. Most of all, one gets the sense that Spring is but a teaser for what’s yet to come.

The brand also found a natural face in Audrey Marnay—not only a quintessential Parisienne but also a working mom—who debuts the house’s Spring looks exclusively here.

“Bonpoint has always been a question of attitude more than age,” says Innamorato. “I’ve always thought that what matters most is having a certain charm.”